New Site BlogBringing you the latest sites to hit the web

omnom.com is a brilliant new tool for when you just want to order in without having to hunt for a restaurant that’s close, affordable and DELIVERS. Omnom brings many lucky Americans this tool.

What’s Unique about Omnom? Apart from having a brilliant name? It’s incredibly easy to use, and has just the right number of search filters to find a list of restaurants that will deliver to your address. You can browse their menus online then add the food you want to your tray and complete the order then and there. You can search by cuisines, the minimum delivery amount (from $10 minimum to $30 minimum) as well as limiting your search to businesses offering free delivery and that Omnom has coupons available for. You can also browse by university or city, so no matter where you are in the U.S. of A., you can hunt down the closest friendly food delivery service.

The site is also cleverly linked to Yelp.com, where you can quickly and easily find reviews and ratings of your potential take-out place.

Could Anything Be Improved? Yes – they could come to Australia! But for all you lucky Americans out there, this is a fantastic site that has been established with everything it needs to grow and flourish. Here’s the very comphrensive list of cities you can find them so far.

Overall: The website does it’s job simply, well and in a fun, joyous way. It makes me want to chow down with cute cartoon monsters in front of a great TV show…

Check it out:

www.omnom.com

teleportus.com is for travellers who want to quickly and easily research their travel options according to the dates of their holidays, the continent they want to visit and type of activity they want to enjoy. The site was created by web designers in Poland who were frustrated by having to spend hours online searching to find flights available during their holidays to their preferred destinations.

What’s unique about Teleportus? Like most of the best concepts, Teleportus is built on existing services and infrastructure, offering users a better way to navigate the information out there online. You can access the Teleportus search engine from the home page, and search for flights according to your departure destination, dates of travel, the continent you want to visit, and best of all, what you want to do there and what kind of temperatures you like. At the moment the search results rely entirely on Opodo.co.uk. I haven’t come across this site before, but it looks very comprehensive.

What could be done better? By using only Opodo, there could be deals that Teleportus is missing which other lowest flight comparison businesses would show up. Another slight issue is that if your search only comes up with one or two options (which mine have when searching Australia and Oceania) the search form doesn’t keep the search details, so you have to fill everything in again. This is a small nuisance, but it would really improve the site if you could do multiple searches more easily.

The concept rests quite a lot on choosing what you what to do on your holiday. Your choices are: Chilling on the Beach, Climbing, Enjoy the Wonders of Nature, Sightseeing, Skiiing / Snowboarding. While this does cover quite a lot, I’d love an Adventuring option to include all the fun physical tours and activities which aren’t just climbing. For example, walking, hiking, rafting and kayaking.

Also, it would be great to have the option of flying back from a different destination. At the moment, all the return flight options have you arriving and departing from the same international airport. Users can get around this by searching for single flights, but it would be cool if that was part of this system, as it would indeed make it easier to plan a trip where you want to see more than one destination.

Overall: These are just a few ideas on what could make this site even better, however it’s already a great concept which is being executed well. And seriously, how can you not love and trust the little dragon??

Check it out:

www.teleportus.com

quotecoil.com is a simple research tool for searching for famous or topic specific quotes by keywords, authors or parts of the half-remembered quotes themselves.

What’s unique about QuoteCoil? Not a whole lot I’m afraid, since there are so many other quote sites out there. However, it really aims to make the process as simple as possible. Rather than having the options to search by author names or by topic, you just put in any information you’ve got then see the matching options. It’s a great way of finding quotes that have specific words in them. While I love sites like ThinkExist and BrainyQuote and regularly use them, I find the simplicity of this site really appealing.

Testing… I did a totally arbitrary comparison test in which the search word “neuroscience” brought up seven results in QuoteCoil, five in ThinkExist and eight in BrainyQuote (though in BrainyQuote you have to click through one more page from the initial results.) Given that the same people are quoted in each, I’ll probably go with QuoteCoil in the future because there are NO ads and NO distractions. That might change, but for now it’s a lovely little site.

Check it out:

quotecoil.com

fraze.it is a phrase finding website for both famous phrases and generic ones. It’s tagline is “The Phrase Search Engine, a resource for improving writing skills.” I find it amusing that while it aims to improve writing it purposely misspells its own name! Excuse me while I focus to stop my eye twitching. Once I get past that little hurdle, I realise that it’s actually a fantastic site.

What’s unique about Fraze.it? It’s quite similar to PhraseUp*, but it really extends the functions of this phrase finding concept. Firstly, you’re given the option to search either generic phrases or famous ones. This basically tells the search engine where to look and makes the results much faster. You can also initially choose from six languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese), however, what really puts the cherry on top is their inclusion of extra search items below the found phrase. For example, this was one of my test searches:

I’ve got to say, this impressed me on a few levels, firstly that it found it, then that it took my straight to Oscar Wilde. I searched that as a famous phrase, so I went back to play with the generic ones. Every search result has a link to the newspaper it was found in (generic results only search newspaper publications, which is another great refinement to the idea).

THEN you can filter the search results yourself, such as by the specific grammatical forms you’re looking for, by the context or by the geographical zone (though the only two choices right now are the UK and US; hopefully that will grow to match their more diverse language options).

Could anything be improved? In terms of functionality, the site is excellent. The only thing that bugs me is the large number of typos and grammatical mistakes on the About Us page.  For example, the opening line is “Need some help with your writings? doesn’t found the right words or the right turn of your phrase?”  It sounds like it has been Google Translated and then not proofread… rookie mistake! But thus a mistake that’s very easy to sort out, so perfectionists can breathe properly and focus on what this great site has to offer.

Check it out:

www.fraze.it

lifeables.com is a site you can use to gather your memories into one place, using information from a range of social media sites as well as adding your own personal writing. It provides a web tool to collect a wide range of your memories – like videos, pictures, comments and stories – to create a multi-media scrapbook of life as you live it.

What’s unique about Lifeables? The system of the site is designed to do the work for you, so rather than having to rewrite memories and compile information, you can simply import content from your social media accounts. This content creates “Collectables”, which are the individual elements that combine to make “Lifeables”, which you can share with as many friends and family members as you like.

The site has many user-friendly aspects, such as the freedom to import content from Facebook friends who aren’t your specific Lifeables.com friends, as well as features like uploading email content if you choose not to use social media. You also own the copyright to all the content you create through the site.

The site is free to use, until your storage reaches 5GB of data. If you require more, it will cost $20 per year for an extra 20GB. The site’s information storage is ‘timeless’ as long as you use it regularly.

Their Planned Development: Lifeables is clear about its plans for developing its services, starting with making all your content downloadable, which would be a wise idea if you found that you weren’t accessing the site regularly. They also plan to move into gift creation by networking with other “industry leaders to expedite the production of whatever gifts you want to create.” When they roll out the “Life Shop” component of the site, users can search for the gift type they want then be linked to vendors.

Overall: it sounds great in theory, and its free to sign up, so all that remains is trying it for yourself to see if the system makes sense to you and whether you like the formatting of the results!

Check it out:

www.lifeables.com

freebiepixels.com is a genuinely free collection of graphic images, including themes, textures, icons and a huge (and very random) range of other images.

Pros: well, it’s free! This is rare to find. Normally sites offer some freebies as a way of showcasing their products. FreebiePixels on the other hand is a community for graphic designers/graphics lovers to share their work under Creative Commons.  Members who upload graphics get pixel points that can go towards putting their own ads on the site, so in that sense it’s a great way of getting your work out there and being seen.

Cons: None really. While there is a bit of advertising on the site, it’s all for graphic design and arts companies and thus part of the community the site is creating, so not a ‘con’ in my book.

Overall: a great resource if you’re looking for freebies and graphic inspiration/help, and a great place for graphic artists to network and be seen.

Check it out:

www.freebiepixels.com

ipiccy.com is an online photo editor that lets yuu edit photos from URLs, Facebook, from your webcam or from your computer. You can then edit individual photos or create collages or blends, as well as using filters and many other photo editing tools. (NB: the photo to your left is an artistic impression of the site…. It may not be entirely accurate.)

What’s unique about iPiccy? You can use it completely online! You have no idea how excited that makes me – I’ve been looking for a fully online photo editor for months. This means I can work with editing and embedding photos from a public computer that only allows internet access and has no programs installed.

Pros: It’s accessible anywhere you have a connection, and it’s very easy to use. It’s also great to be able to use images from a wide range of sources. AND there are so many things you can play with! So many filters! I’m quite fond of the “Liquify” filter myself, which lets you drag and blur wherever you like. In their blog there’s even a video tutorial on how to watermark your photos. Very useful!

Cons: The only thing I haven’t found a way of doing is copying in a screen grab, but that’s not to say there isn’t a way to do it. Let me know if you come across it.

Overall: A very nifty site! I love not having to sign up or download anything, and being able to play with random pictures to my heart’s content.

Check it out:

ipiccy.com

theartistifier.com is a simple site that lets you create ‘artistic’ videos directly from YouTube urls.

What’s unique about it? Well, it’s like Instagram for YouTube videos. It helps you create black and white silent movies from any YouTube clip with the typical silent movie era music. You can also insert captions wherever in the clip you want.

Pros: it’s very simple to use. Just copy and paste any YouTube url into the front page of The Artistifier and it will take you to the ‘editing’ page where you can add the captions. It’s also a nice looking site.

Cons: you can only use YouTube clips, and you can’t edit the length of the clips or have any control over the video itself. You also can’t control the music, which runs out at about two minutes, and has preset highs and lows which may or may not work with the video.

Overall: it’s a cute site, if very gimicky. I’m not sure that anything you create on it would seriously “Make Any YouTube Video Award-Winning” because you’re doing very, very little to the video. It would be a lot better if you could upload your own videos and have some editing control, but then, if you want to do that you probably need a decent video editor. For what it is, it’s cute.

Check it out:

theartistifier.com

scriffon.com is an interesting new site for publishing your writing online. It functions similarly to a blogging site but emphasises writing of more traditional forms and higher quality. So they encourage you to publish your essays, poems, recipes, stories… basically, it’s a blog for people who don’t want a typical blog but a clean white space on which to display their perfected words in nice font. I must say, as a book lover, this really appeals as an online writing space.

When you sign up for the free profile (everything on the site is free to use) you can draft and redraft your work, before and after publishing it. Your posts will appear on the home page feed as well as on your profile.

What stands out most about the site is its minimalist design. This design is aimed to let the words take the focus – not flashy graphics, videos, ads and all the other distractions tend to appear.

This website will appeal to the writing purist who accepts the need to branch out onto the web and wants to do it with style.

Check it out:

scriffon.com